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Good- enough Processing in Reading in Adolescents and Adults: the Effect of Audial Noise.

Student: Savcenco Alexandra

Supervisor: Anastasiya Lopukhina

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2018

The present research aims to investigate how adolescents use different strategies to process sentences, and how their processing differs from that by adults. We will focus on the so-called good-enough approach to language comprehension. The good-enough approach assumes that people do not always engage in fully detailed processing of linguistic input. Rather, the comprehenders form shallow and superficial representations when confronted with a difficulty such as a complex syntactic structure or noisy input. Previous studies on good-enough processing have examined only adults and elderly people. In this study we compare the two groups of participants: adolescents and adults — in how they read sentences in silent laboratory conditions and in the presence of audial noise. Each experiment consists of 28 experimental sentences and 56 fillers. Self-paced reading paradigm is used. The task is to read the sentence and to answer the question. Healthy native speakers of Russian: 15 adolescents (aged 13-17) and 15 adults (aged 20-40) will participate in this study. We intended to understand how adolescents use strategies and whether their syntactic processing is similar to that of adults. We expected that both groups of participants will demonstrate greater reliance on the good-enough strategy in the experiment with noise as compared to the experiment without noise. We also expected adolescents to be less reliant on the good-enough processing than adults. The results of the experiment showed that in noise conditions teenagers made fewer mistakes than adults, although they spent more time on it. The hypothesis that teenagers spend significantly more time than adults in an experiment with noise was confirmed. The noise does not affect the correctness of the answers. In noise conditions, adults rely more on good-enough processing, and in laboratory conditions on good-enough processing teenagers rely more than adults.

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